Is Henry Golding "Asian enough"?

Quote from ilikeJB

But its the reverse for Golding's case. He's mixed, doesn't look white but because of his half white, he is considered white immediately.

lmao if i didn't know he was half-white (which i only found out just now) i wouldn't think he was white or white-passing just looking at him and I already watched that movie 3 times.

it seem like this twitter person has a very wide range of what they consider as white or white-passing but a very limited range on what is considered "Asian". This is a very big continent yet most people think of East Asian features as the "Asian" features which is already an insult. This probably why people are mad.

I think there are two issues happening here, each worth their own discussion, honestly.

1. There is an ongoing issue with people's perceptions around ethnicity/race.

I listened to and shut down a discussion where (non-Latinos) people argued that someone didn't look Latino enough in a commercial, as if there wasn't a range of diversity from blue-eyed blonde to deep mocha. So when people say someone doesn't seem "X enough", there is the perception that it's their narrow band of what they think the ethnicity/race looks like. In many parts of the US, the assumption is that "Asian" looks like a person of East Asian descent, ignoring most of SEA.

(It's worth noting here that specific regions of the country have more nuanced views: CA has the largest population of many ethnicities, from Filipino to Vietnamese, while places like New York City and Seattle also have a range of diversity. As a Californian that lives in a major city, I see folks of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Cambodian Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani and Indonesian descent every day (just counting off my head of friends and coworkers), so I suspect most metropolitan Californians have a different perspective of what is Asian than someone in middle America. And even from city to city in CA, you might have a different perspective judging by the dominant ethnic group. You can find bahn mi ripoffs in a conventional grocery store, Lunar New Year lottery tickets at a Chevron and [mediocre] lumpia in the frozen food section.)

2. There is a valid concern based on Hollywood's current and long-standing biases of a "certain type of person" being selected from a race/ethnicity standpoint.

I'm mixed and light-skinned - I present as some sort of ethnic, although most people can never figure what type. Black people know and greet me with "Black and what?", while other non-Black folks assume I am Latina (usually Puerto Rican) , Cape Verdean, Pacific Islander or even (rarely) white. Someone like me should never be cast to play a Black person, yet Storm (the Marvel superhero), who is always clearly and explicitly presented as African and dark-skinned, was played by two light, biracial actresses. (Make it make sense).

Or how they they cast Zoe Saldana to play Nina Simone. She's not mixed, but she is considerably lighter and looks nothing like her and had to wear makeup and a prosthetic nose. I could almost give it to you if she was such an outstanding actor (it would still be problematic af, but she's not, so I really got nothing. (Make it make sense.)

This is a pretty standard MO for Hollywood, and reflects a desire to make people look more similar to the Eurocentric beauty standard. We see it even here where the KBS is different than the Eurocentric ones many of us are working with, whether consciously or unconconsiously, and people have a lot of strong opinions about it when we are working with our own.

When was the last time you saw a dark-skinned female love interest in a mainstream movie that was not Black Panther? (Which honestly was a detail that I loved so much - there is very much the cultural trope of a darker man and lighter woman (and while darker men can sometimes be the main character, darker women are not), so I was fucking over the moon to see the love interest be darker than the hero! There's a lot of cultural references I love in that movie and I like to believe that was as intentional as choosing a non-conventional love interest in the first place. I love her and she's gorgeous and a great actress but there's a definite Halle Berry type in these movies.)

(I'm using these examples about Black people solely because this is the issue I'm more familiar with and don't want to try to speak to the Asian experience when I am not Asian, but I definitely see the parallels and the frustration. And even I, who am neither Asian nor Middle Eastern, fell out of my chair about that Aladdin casting.)

So I also understand where some of the viewpoint and frustration could be coming from. There is still a very high tendency to cast mixed ethnicity actors in "ethnic" roles. Because there are so very few of these roles, I get why sometimes people get pissed off. I'm all for diversity and all for mixed representation as a mixed person myself (my mom talks about how far things have come to not only have a Black (if you're lucky) and white option for Barbies, but many shades and varieties ), but at least make live-action Jasmine look like the damned cartoon (yes, the actress was mixed with white).

i saw that discourse in twitter a few days ago.

basically an american had a problem with asian representation in Crazy Rich Asians because they didn't think the actor doing the representation was asian enough. actual asians were telling the american to stfu because they felt well represented but the american insisted that those asians weren't smart enough to realise they weren't well represented. hilarious